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OpenAI is facing 30 new lawsuits from victims of the devastating school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, who accuse the company of providing “substantial assistance and encouragement” to the shooter and failing to alert police about her alarming ChatGPT interactions during the run-up to the mass killing.
The AI company’s legal peril is growing: it’s now fighting more than 50 lawsuits alleging that extensive use of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, wrought psychological harm, physical injury, or even death on users or those around them.
The new lawsuits were brought against OpenAI by teachers and students who survived the Tumbler Ridge Massacre in February, in which eight adults and children were killed and 27 more were wounded in a rural Canadian mining town. The shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother at their home before attacking the school with a modified rifle and long gun, where she murdered five students — all aged between 12 and 13 — and a teacher.
Shortly after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, months before the shooting occurred, had considered warning local law enforcement about Van Rootselaar’s disturbing conversations with ChatGPT, which contained graphic descriptions of mass violence. After an internal debate, OpenAI leaders opted not to alert local officials. Instead, it deactivated Van Rootselaar’s account, though the eventual shooter simply made a new one.
The dozens of new lawsuits join an initial seven complaints filed against OpenAI in April by the families of those killed in the attack, as well as the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who was shot in the head and neck but survived. According to the WSJ, new plaintiffs include traumatized school staff and students — one teen played dead, while another was forced to run over the bodies of peers while fleeing bullets — and others who were shot but lived.
“My colleagues and I are haunted by the memory of shielding children with our own bodies as our ears rang from the sound of continual gunshots and high-pitched screams,” plaintiff Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher who sheltered students under her desk, told the WSJ in a statement.
The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of negligence and “aiding and abetting a mass shooting,” alleging that ChatGPT stoked Van Rootselaar’s violent fantasies. The shooter’s chat logs have not yet been made public.
In a statement shared on X, OpenAI chief safety officer Jason Kwon wrote that “there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families.”
Kwon added that OpenAI safety teams “use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment, but within standards to minimize discretion and produce principled decisions that strive to balance security and privacy for the people who use our service and the public. That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people. They also partner with mental health, behavioral, and law enforcement experts to help us refine our criteria for when conversations cross the line into an imminent and credible risk and to assess difficult cases.”
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